The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  The same thought crossed Reg Seekings’s mind when he got back to the monastery, to find the bloody, rotting flesh of his comrades still lying in the alley where the shell had hit their truck. They had lain there untouched for two days and the stink was appalling. The tragedy of it, staved off by the adrenalin-high of the battle, hit him all at once. These highly skilled men had, he thought, been squandered by staff wallahs who had no idea what they were doing.

  That evening the remains were collected. Padre Bob Lunt wrapped each bundle in a blanket, while L.Cpl. Sid Payne, RAC, supervised the digging of graves in the nearby garden. ‘Into the gathering dusk,’ said Lt. Pete Davis, ‘the silent crowd of men emerged from their billets, with heads bared and softened tread … in a quiet voice the padre read the service.’8

  49. Never quite lived up to its promise

  Termoli was 1 SRS’s last action. By 12 October the squadron was in Molfetta, near Bari. John Tonkin turned up there six days later, having escaped from his German captors. Tonkin had been wined and dined by the GOC 1 Airborne Division, General Heidrich, and had been warned obliquely about a secret order from Hitler that all British commandos should be ‘ruthlessly destroyed by German troops’, even if they surrendered. How much Tonkin passed on, or even believed, about Hitler’s notorious Kommandobefehl is unknown. In any case, it was far from the minds of the SRS that winter. They rested at Molfetta until the last week in November, and Mayne ‘celebrated’ in customary fashion. He got drunk. He trashed the mess. He ripped out railings from a balcony. He gave the officers permission to have a party with local girls, then, after downing a bottle of whisky, ordered the girls to leave and booted the officers through the door. He splattered medical officer Phil Gunn against a wall, injuring his shoulder.

  From Molfetta the squadron returned to North Africa by landing ship, not to Kabrit, but to the 2 SAS camp at Philippeville, forty miles north of Constantine, in Algeria. The camp had been largely vacated by 2 SAS, which was now based at Noci in Italy. It was a huddle of tents pitched in a grove of cork-oaks between the beach and dense maquis scrub that hid a malarial salt marsh. Beyond the scrub, forested hills rose to a height of a thousand feet, their knobbly peaks stretching across the skyline like knuckles.

  After David Stirling had gone in the bag in January, it had looked as if his mantle would be inherited by his elder brother, William Stirling, Scots Guards, commanding 2 SAS. While 1 SAS’s days had then looked numbered, 2 SAS’s star was in the ascendant: it had seemed then that it would be the keeper of the SAS flame. Bill Stirling had some things in common with David. He was tall, he had a warm personality, he got on well with the men, and he drove motorcars with reckless disregard for anyone’s safety. He was more intellectual and less gung-ho than his younger brother – not lacking in bravery, but an organizer rather than a have-a-go patrol leader in the field. He never attained David’s legendary status.

  Bill had been at the Stirling flat in Cairo when David had first broached the SAS idea, and was thus privy to it from the beginning. Like David, he was a commando officer, having served as commander of 62 Commando, or Small Scale Raiding Force, a unit raised originally to conduct coup de main raids for the Special Operations Executive. 62 Commando was sent to Algeria after the Torch landings, but, like Layforce earlier, had been disbanded for lack of a role. Bill Stirling managed to get authorization to raise 2 SAS from its ashes. To ensure that its training was as rigorous as that of 1 SAS, he borrowed ex-jockey Capt. Sandy Scratchley and one of his brother’s best NCOs, Sgt. ‘Honest Dave’ Kershaw, on a temporary basis. The training matched the course at Kabrit – infantry skills, PT, demolitions, Axis weapons, route-marches and parachuting, which was run at a parachute school in Morocco. Final selection for 2 SAS depended on the ability to run to the top of a nearby six-hundred-foot hill and back in sixty minutes. Failures were RTU’d.

  2 SAS was based round a hard core of ex-62 Commando men, and a few experienced hands such as Scratchley, twice-wounded tank veteran Roy Farran, Major Geoffrey Appleyard, ex-7 Commando, who had helped train 62 Commando and had starred in its raid on Guernsey, and Captain Philip Pinckney, ex-12 Commando, who had served with the British-based Special Boat Section. Despite this, though, most of its personnel lacked both commando training and combat experience.

  It was never to achieve the cachet of 1 SAS. In Italy it had been outdone and outshone by 1 SRS’s dazzling actions. Mayne had proved everyone, including David Stirling, wrong about his command capabilities, and established 1 SRS as the top special forces mob in the British army. If 2 SAS had never quite lived up to its promise, it was mainly because many of the tasks it was handed were pointless or badly planned by outsiders. Attempts to operate in jeeps in Tunisia proved ineffective because of the cultivated and heavily populated environment. A scheme to destroy a radar station on the Italian island of Lampedusa was thwarted when Italian defenders heard the SAS-men coming and blitzed fire on them as they made the beach. A recce of another island, Pantelleria, turned sour when the SAS team accidentally dropped the prisoner they had grabbed as an informant down a cliff. The raiders had to abort the mission. Op Marigold, a joint 2 SAS/SBS raid to snatch a prisoner from Sardinia, went wrong when one of the marauders dropped his rifle and alerted defenders on the beach. The SAS-men scrambled back to their submarine empty-handed.

  The problem was not that Bill Stirling had failed to grasp his brother’s concept of the SAS as a strategic force operating behind enemy lines in small parties. In fact, Bill suggested to HQ Allied Forces that 2 SAS should be dropped in up to a hundred and forty small packets on Sicily and the Italian mainland, before and during the invasion. They could soften up German lines of communication prior to Allied landings. They could wreak havoc as the Allies pushed forward. Supplied with jeeps landed in gliders, they could keep up the pressure indefinitely.

  Instead, the High Command assigned A Squadron, 2 SAS, under Sandy Scratchley to capture a lighthouse at Capo Passero on Sicily, with gun emplacements threatening the Allied landings. The lighthouse was captured without any resistance from the Italians, but scarcely proved a fit target for the unit.

  Two groups of Geoffrey Appleyard’s B Squadron were dropped in northern Sicily to bump roads and convoys, cut telephone wires, disrupt the Catania–Messina railway and hit the German HQ near Enna. The mission achieved nothing of significance. There was no rehearsal, and the men hadn’t been trained in regrouping on the drop-zone. In a landing ominously reminiscent of Squatter, equipment containers went astray and wireless sets were smashed, putting the raiders out of comms with HQ. The aircraft carrying Squadron OC Appleyard vanished on the way back to base. The second drop was spotted, and the stick commander captured. ‘The value of damage and disorganisation inflicted on the enemy,’ the official report ran, ‘was not proportionate to the number of men, amount of equipment and planes used.’1

  In September a composite squadron of 2 SAS was deployed at Taranto to carry out recce patrols and hit opportunity targets ahead of the Allied push – a role that could have been better performed by a light armoured-car unit. A jeep-mounted group from D Squadron, commanded by Roy Farran, shot up German convoys, linked up with Canadian forces, became involved in street-fighting, and pushed up to Bari, where it was assigned the task of rounding up escaped Allied prisoners. Only fifty were scooped up. ‘The military return for the use of sixty-one men … was not justified,’ the report read, ‘when they could have been employed on more important sabotage duties.’2 Finally, Farran and a small group were sent to Termoli to examine the possibilities of carrying out deep infiltration missions behind German lines. It was during this job that they encountered Mayne’s SRS, and were caught up in the defence of Termoli.

  Meanwhile, two seven-man sticks of 2 SAS parachutists had jumped into the La Spezia–Genoa area of north Italy to hit railways being used to ferry supplies to German forces. This mission, Operation Speedwell, was at least a classic use of SAS troops, and was successful in derailing trains and cutting the railway. Too
few men were dropped, though, to make a major impact, and casualties were high. Bill Stirling, who had been pushing for a larger deployment from the start, burned. ‘I submit that examination should be made,’ he wrote to AFHQ, ‘into why, aircraft and personnel being available, an effective force was not sent against German lines of communication in northern Italy, so that when similar opportunity occurs in future, advantage may be taken of it.’3

  In late October, 2 SAS finally got lucky when four parties landed by motor-torpedo boat, led by Farran, managed to cut the Ancona–Pescara railway seventeen times, and to mine the main road. A follow-up operation in December, Op Sleepy Lad, led by Sandy Scratchley, succeeded once again in cutting the railway and disrupting road traffic, but was marred when the Royal Navy failed to make the extraction. The SAS-men managed to escape by commandeering a fishing-boat.

  2 SAS would remain in Italy for another four months, but Mayne’s squadron was earmarked for Blighty. On Boxing Day 1 SRS sailed from Algiers on SS Otranto. Mayne himself had flown back weeks earlier. Lt. Johnny Cooper, now returned from OCTU, and Lt. Mike Sadler, recovered from his stomach ulcers, had been flown to Scotland. Sadler’s task was to set up an SAS intelligence section, while Cooper’s was to prepare a camp for the unit at Mauchline in Ayrshire. Mayne had landed to find that there was no longer any talk of disbanding the SAS. On the contrary, with effect from 7 January 1944, the reputed ‘social misfit’ Major Paddy Mayne would become Lieutenant-Colonel Blair Robert Mayne, DSO and bar, Commanding Officer, 1 Special Air Service Regiment.

  50. ‘We don’t think about you at all’

  There was a new wave of optimism in Britain. The Germans had been turned back at Stalingrad, the US had joined the Allies, Rommel had been pushed out of North Africa, Italy had been invaded and the Italians had surrendered. The Russians were advancing from the east, rolling up lost towns one by one. The Germans were still fighting in southern Europe, but the divisions engaged there were pinned down and couldn’t be released for other fronts. When the Allies unleashed Operation Overlord, the invasion of France, scheduled for 1 May, Hitler’s forces would find themselves trapped between a rock and a hard place.

  France provided the right conditions for guerrilla warfare. It was a country with an oppressed population, occupied by a foreign power. The Special Operations Executive, formed about the same time as the commandos, had been exploiting these conditions for four years. The SOE worked through the Maquis – the French Resistance – using French-speaking agents, men and women, some ex-forces, others civilians, to organize propaganda and sabotage. Unlike the SAS, the SOE was not military – its goals were mainly political, and it was run by the Ministry of Economic Warfare. At the beginning of the year, though, SOE chief Major General Colin Gubbins suddenly started putting his operatives into uniform. ‘You can bet your life,’ wrote Sandy Scratchley, ‘that he did this because he was windy of the potential of the SAS.’1

  If this was the case, Gubbins’s worries were well founded. On 7 January, the day Mayne was promoted half-colonel, 1 Special Air Service Brigade was formed. It was a recognition of the value of military-type special forces outfits – not only the SAS itself, but also the commandos, the Airborne, the SBS, Orde Wingate’s Chindits, and the LRDG. Commanded by Brigadier Roderick ‘Rory’ McLeod, Royal Artillery, the Brigade was made up of five units – 1 SAS, under Mayne, 2 SAS under Bill Stirling, 3 and 4 SAS, French parachute battalions, and 5 SAS, a Belgian unit of squadron strength. Exactly two years earlier, in January 1942, the SAS had been down to only seventeen men. It would soon number two and a half thousand.

  In January ‘Mayne’s Boys’ docked at Greenock in teeming rain. Mayne was there to greet them. He announced that everyone would get a month’s home leave, a rail warrant, and a hundred pounds. When they returned, on 4 February, they were directed not to Mauchline, where Johnny Cooper had originally been instructed to set up camp, but to Darvel, a village in Ayrshire. It lay about ten miles from 1 SAS Brigade Main HQ at Sorn Castle, where Rory McLeod had set up shop. Brigade Tactical HQ would be at Moor Park at Rickmansworth, on the outskirts of London.

  The SAS Brigade was officially part of the Army Air Corps for administrative purposes. For operations, though, it belonged to Lt. General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning’s 1 Airborne Corps, itself part of Montgomery’s 21 Army Group. The invasion of France would be in part a needle-match between two old adversaries: Erwin Rommel commanded the German armies in France.

  From the start, there was jealousy between the Airborne and the SAS that would outlive the war. ‘Although few of the Airborne people had much in the way of operational experience,’ Johnny Cooper said, ‘they tended to look down on us as poor country cousins and thought that their professionalism overshadowed our private army outlook.’2

  At the suggestion of his wife, novelist Daphne du Maurier, Browning had introduced a maroon-red beret for the Airborne, together with sleeve-flashes depicting Bellerophon riding Pegasus. As the SAS was now ‘Airborne’, Browning decreed that the Regiment should ditch its sand-coloured beret in favour of the ‘maroon machine’. Mayne was not amused, but since the order only applied once the existing beret had worn out, he continued to wear his original beret, and made sure it lasted. He told his men that, once in the field, they could stuff their maroon berets in their kit and don their ‘real’ headgear.

  The SAS retained its flaming sword badge, but the men wore Pegasus on their sleeves. They fought a desperate battle to retain the honour of wearing wings above the left breast-pocket, instead of on the sleeve like Airborne troops. These might seem trifling points to outsiders, but as Mayne and Stirling had always recognized, they were vital to SAS identity. Rivalry was inevitable. Both units were para-trained corps d’élites with a sense of being ‘men apart’, bonded by the mystique of shared hardship. Their ideologies, though, were quite different. Airborne units were trained to fight in platoons and companies, honed to work as closely interdependent teams, and encouraged to develop an aggressive ‘do-or-die’ spirit. Anyone who didn’t wear the ‘maroon machine’ was an inferior ‘crap hat’. They were geared to sharp, ferocious actions, and equipped to operate independently for a limited period. ‘The Paras are arguably the best-trained shock-troops in the world,’ admitted a later SAS veteran Ken Connor, ‘with an inbuilt self-belief that they are better than anyone else in this type of action.’3 They were also considered expendable. The Allied planning staff estimated that only fifty per cent of its paratroops, and thirty per cent of its glider-borne troops, would survive the first operation on D-Day. When General Eisenhower left the camp of his crack 101 Airborne Division after a pre-invasion pep-talk, he was seen to be in tears.

  Despite its title and origins, the SAS had ceased to be purely a parachute unit after Squatter. Parachuting was only one means of delivery, and its methods of operation were distinct from those of the Airborne. Airborne battalions dropped on or near their targets, often in full sight of the enemy, on the theory that casualties sustained in the air would be less than those suffered if the troops had to fight their way to their objective. SAS drops were carried out in secrecy some distance behind enemy lines.

  Though the SAS had proved at Termoli and elsewhere that it could operate as a regular unit, and fight defensively, the collective ethos wasn’t its main impulse. SAS-men were selected for individual initiative, and were trained to operate in small groups behind enemy lines for long periods. Its modus operandi was ‘stealth if possible, force if necessary’ – it wasn’t geared to big, stand-up battles, but to hit-and-run tactics.

  The appointment of Roderick McLeod as SAS Brigadier was not greeted with universal enthusiasm. The SAS regarded McLeod as an outsider, though in fact they could have fared worse. A former Staff College instructor with a deep interest in clandestine warfare, he fought the SAS corner tenaciously, and attempted to preserve the purity of its approach.

  At Darvel, 1 SAS was housed in disused spinning mills, with the officers billeted in private houses, and the officers�
�� mess located in the Turf Hotel. The training-ground for the Brigade would be in the nearby Cunninghame Hills, where SAS veterans of the desert and Italy reacquainted themselves with the misery of snow, rain and biting winds. ‘We thought it was tough dealing with extremes of heat,’ said one desert veteran. ‘It was a treat compared to those bloody windswept moors.’4 They trained mostly in the dark, navigating by compass, carrying steel-framed Bergen rucksacks full of sandbags, with ‘thunderflash’ charges in their webbing. After gruelling treks over mist-shrouded moors, through peat-bogs, and across gushing streams, they would set their thunder-flashes on roads, bridges or a railway spur line specially assigned to them by the railway company. They would melt back into the mists before the charges went off. ‘Like this,’ wrote Derrick Harrison, ‘we learned to make our way with unerring accuracy to places that were little more than pinpoints on the map.’5

  They learned how to locate underground telephone and telegraph cables and destroy junction-boxes, to short-circuit telephone communications using fusewire. On one occasion a group of SAS trainees used this technique with great success on a Scottish village. A householder who tried to call the fire brigade couldn’t get through, and his house burned down.

  SOE agents were hauled in to brief them on the French Resistance – the Maquis – who would be their eyes, ears and support groups on the ground. Maquis bands were not homogeneous. The FTP – Francs-tireurs et Partisans – was a communist organization that had been in action since the German invasion of Russia. The Armée Secrète (AS) was mostly made up of former French soldiers, and was training to go into action after the Allied invasion. After D-Day all resistance was supposed to be unified under a single body, the FFI – Forces Françaises de L’Intérieure – but the SAS were warned to expect friction between the different groups, who were suspicious of each other’s political motives.